It is not like choosing a wedding dress or a cell phone; It is something different and hence need to be chosen intelligently and logically. When it comes to choosing a CMS i.e. Content Management System for developing a website, it becomes a quite cumbersome task for the web developers. Therefore, a random choice can lead to harmful results in the future. In this article we will discuss some salient prerequisites which need to be kept in mind before opting for a particular Content Management System. It has been a widely known fact that the market is flooded with a large number of CMS  , but the web site designers and developers must make sure there preference according to the front end and back end requirements of the website under construction.

Following are some of the main points to be given emphasis while choosing Content Management System:

Compatibility – It is an prominent feature of a CMS. The current version of CMS must be backward compatible with all other versions in order to resolve programming language conflicts during run time. For Example, – DotNetNuke CMS handles all time of ASP.NET versions.

Extensibility – The CMS should be easily extendable i.e. it must be capable of integrating with third party API, Softwares, plugins etc. For Example, – Joomla is a highly extendable CMS which supports third party plugins which add to its latest features.

Technology being used – Another crucial prerequisite is the technology being used by the developers. DNN is a CMS which is written in the language known as Visual Basin and works with ASP.NET whereas Joomla, Word press etc are based on PHP which is an open source language.

Specific Edition – Some CMS have different editions. Hence the knowledge of each version is must for choosing the appropriate CMS. To give a brief example, we have DNN CMS which has two types of Editions. One edition is famous by the name “Professional” and other by the name “Elite”.

Customer Support Services – As website development is a Client based task, it requires to make changes in the websites according to the SRS i.e. Software Requirement Specifications of the user. But sometimes the CMS does not supports what the user wants, or it gives errors on code execution. Hence in those cases customer support services provided by the CMS is needed a lot. The one which provides faster support is considered to be as the best CMS.

Other Features – There are certain other features also which are needed for a proper website development. These feature include auto generated code for plugins, data replication, forum systems, photo gallery, event management etc. The CMS which provides these in built codes are more worthy to chosen rather than other CMS’s because the developer do not have the time to generate all these codes on their own every time they want.

The above mentioned prerequisites are extremely valuable, and each web developer must pay attention to these facts before choosing a Content Management System. However, this is not an exclusive list of prerequisites and the user must apply his brain to decide the best CMS.